Ship of Fools (1965)

July 29, 1965

SHIP OF FOOLS

By Bosley Crowther

Published: July 29, 1965

Out of Katherine Anne Porter's voluminous novel, Ship of Fools, which was a big prizewinning best-seller in 1962, the producer and director Stanley Kramer has fetched a powerful, ironic film. It goes by the same name, and it opened yesterday at the Sutton and the Victoria.

Call it a Grand Hotel-type picture if you must have a quick descriptive tag for this multifaceted drama of an assortment of characters traveling in a German passenger vessel from Veracruz, Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, in 1933. For it has the same interwoven pattern as that memorable star-crowded film, and it entertains in much the same manner with its cross-play of transient characters.

Likewise, it offers a full roster of older and younger stars in its fascinating medley of sharp and colorful roles. It has Vivien Leigh as a declining American divorcée, José Ferrer as a brazen Jew-baiting German businessman, Lee Marvin as a Texas baseball player, George Segal and Elizabeth Ashley as a pair of American artists and lovers, Simone Signoret as a fading Spanish countess, José Greco as the head of a troupe of ferocious Spanish dancers, plus others in lesser roles. And it has the same sort of casual ending as the archetypal Grand Hotel.

But there is such wealth of reflection upon the human condition in Ship of Fools and so subtle an orchestration of the elements of love and hate, achieved through an expert compression of the novel by Mr. Kramer and his script writer, Abby Mann, that it is really not fair to tag it with the label of any previous film. It has its own quiet distinction in the way it illuminates a theme.

Furthermore, it is notable that the actor who plays the key role is not a starnot yet, at leastin the reckoning of Hollywood magnitudes. He is Oskar Werner, the modest and much-accomplished European who is best known in this country from Decision Before Dawn and Jules and Jim. Yet it is his fine performance as the ship's doctor, a sad, tired, and disillusioned man, that pumps the main irony and pity into the troubled heart of this film.

It is the poignant figure of the doctor that Mr. Kramer and Mr. Mann have framed to symbolize the exhaustion of that old and cultivated German class that might have stopped the Nazis, had it possessed the wits and energy. And it is he whom they have clearly made the symbol of the helpless healer in this soul-sick ship of fools.

But mainly it is his involvement in a poignantly brief love affair with the tacitly doomed Spanish countess, whom Miss Signoret so finely plays, that makes for the focal implications and the major sympathy. For it is this love affair, so tender, understanding, and sad, between the two frustrated creatures of an obsolescent breedhe the uncommitted Junker, she the futilely committed aristocratthat stands as the fading demonstration of human dignity and despair.

Around it swirl all the other distasteful and pathetic charactersthe loud and noxious anti-Semite of scene-stealing Mr. Ferrer who spreads the foulness of hatred through the first-class saloon; the aging, man-hating, lonely woman of the beautifully decaying Miss Leigh; the comical cuss of Mr. Marvin, the story of whose life is compressed in his oft-repeated grumble that he can't hit a curve over the outside corner of the plate.

Around it, too, swirls the peevish and immature affair of Mr. Segal and Miss Ashley, neither of whom is very good; the cruelly contemptuous clattering of Mr. Greco's troupe; the stuffy and mawkish self-serving of several Germanic types; and the cryptic philosophizing of a cheerful dwarf, played superbly by Michael Dunn.

All of this is symbolic of the passage of foolish humanity into the maw of Nazism, if you chose to see it that way, and it may even be symbolic of the eternal folly and helplessness of man. Mr. Kramer has put it into motion at a leisurely, rolling pace that suggests the cyclical rhythm of a voyage across the seaor across the horizonless stretches of a complacent world.

It is a perpetually engrossing and thought-provoking film that he has aptly put down at this moment, and it eminently deserves to be seen.

SHIP OF FOOLS (MOVIE)

Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer; written by Abby Mann, based on the novel by Katherine Anne Porter; cinematographer, Ernest Laszlo; edited by Robert C. Jones; music by Ernest Gold; production designer, Robert Clatworthy; released by Columbia Pictures. Black and white. Running time: 149 minutes.